We drive the 2019 VW Jetta before we've actually seen it

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The Jetta sedan is Volkswagen’s best-seller in the United States, but the car has had something of an identity crisis in its current iteration. Our Jetta is a unique design different from the one Europeans get, one that’s been softened and, some would argue, decontented for what VW brass determined American drivers wanted. It’s a decent compact sedan, but it lacks the playful, fun-to-drive nature of the best Jettas past.

Thanks to what VW executives euphemistically term “certain events in 2015,” VW’s corporate structure has changed to the extent that North America is its own separate company –- it gets platform and powertrain engineering from Germany, but it gets to choose what it does with those components. The net result is that there’s only one Jetta moving forward, and due to Europe’s lack of interest in three-box sedans, VW won’t even sell the Jetta there anymore. Weird, eh?

That brings us to the new 7th-generation 2018 VW Jetta, and more specifically to Volkswagen’s Arizona Proving Grounds where I had the chance to drive a prototype Jetta for a few hours and tour the facility (more on that later). The most important thing to know is that the new car moves onto VW’s outstanding MQB platform, which also underpins the Golf/GTI, Audi A3 and even the Atlas SUV.

This may or may not be what our 2019 Jetta prototypes looked like beneath the elaborate black-and-white camouflage.

Want to know what it looks like? You and I both will have to wait until the Detroit auto show in January to see it in the metal, but through the camouflage (and the illustration above) I can tell you the new Jetta adopts the fashionable coupe/sedan fastback roofline and that there’s a prominent character line running the length of the car at about the doorhandle level. Squinting in the Arizona sun and using some imagination, expect something along the lines of a ¾-scale VW Arteon – not a bad model to follow.

Same with the interior – I drove the new Jetta for four hours with the dash, center stack and instruments covered by a thick black fabric, an engineer in the back seat telling me how fast I was going. That said, a few peeks afforded during drive-mode changes showed that the new Golf instrument panel is pretty much going to be lifted and dropped directly into the Jetta – again, a good place to find inspiration.

(As an aside, if you want a unique driving experience, try full-throttle-lapping a high-speed banked oval with no instrumentation; my rear-seat navigator claimed I was traveling at exactly 127 mph, but thanks to the stability afforded by the banking and lack of data it could have been 60…or 200).

This is the 2018 VW Golf R dash; the Jetta will likely get something similar, but the digital instrument cluster may be reserved for an upmarket GLI model (or not offered at all).

While our drive was short and somewhat controlled, the combination of high-speed oval, road course and slalom/wet braking station shed light on the car’s basic capabilities. If you’re familiar with current cars on the MQB platform – the Golf and GTI, for example – you can get a good sense of how the Jetta performs. It’s sprung a bit more softly than the hatchbacks, but it’s far more playful than the “Americanized” Jetta we currently get.

On the road course there’s the typical front-drive tendency toward understeer, but modulating the throttle and brake it’s easy to shift weight a bit and bring the rear around just enough to point the car where you want it to go. Brake pedal feel is outstanding with a long, progressive stroke, and the steering is the same slightly overboosted rack that doesn’t offer much resistance but still manages decent feedback from the wheels.

Unfortunately, none of our testers were equipped with the six-speed manual transmission, but the good news is one will be offered. The eight-speed auto will make the average slushbox Jetta buyer perfectly happy, though – it’s smooth and reasonably quick to shift, and it’s good at keeping the 1.4-liter turbo four in its sweet spot in normal driving. On the road course in sport/auto mode, it occasionally frustrated with sluggish downshifts during rapid brake/throttle transitions, but it’s not the kind of driving 99 percent of automatic Jettas will ever see.

Until we see it – and drive it – uncovered and on regular roads, any Jetta impressions have to be qualified. But it appears Volkswagen’s best-seller is poised to return to its premium compact roots, with driving dynamics that should again interest enthusiasts. Whether that’s enough, in the face of the market’s wholesale shift to SUVs, to retain its prominence remains to be seen.

Andrew Stoy
- Digital editor Andrew Stoy has spent the past 20 years wrenching on and writing about cars. He's worked everywhere from dealer service bays to the headquarters of the world's largest automakers.
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